Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-02-12/Financial state hullabaloo

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Notes: Bandwidth and hosting figures based on publicly reported amounts (for example here). Staff expenses estimate is my own, using the current staff and approximate salaries and including taxes paid for employees but not contractors. Depreciation estimate based on audit, as indicated, but converting to a 3-year useful life instead of 5 years, a change recommended by the auditors. --Michael Snow 19:27, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Hmm. There seem to be a trend of skyrocketing staff expenses. 2004:~10% (just travel, no personel? ~7,500 total) [1]. 2005: ~15% (10 personel, 5 travel, office) [2] Note personel (2 full time, 2 part time) took 33k. And now we are talking about a ~100% doubling of staff with about 1500% increase of their salary? That estimate was about 300%. Coupled with personel expenses going from ~1/5 of technical to ~3/2 of technical? I am sure there are good reasons for it, but it would certainly make an interesting story to hear about. On the bright side, it's nice to see the organization growing so much :) -- _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk}  07:22, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Has there been any debate about the seemingly-ever-increasing list of staff (and consequent increase in staff costs)? If so, can someone provide links.

Every dollar spent on salaries is a dollar not spent on bandwith and servers. -- ALoan (Talk) 11:40, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

I'd guess that the importance of Fundation is high enough that we need to higher real professionals. Seeing as how it is next to impossible to get developer help for meta:General User Survey for example I am all for paying people to do stuff, but it would be nice to now exactly what we are getting, now that our personel costs, not really related to running the projects themselves, are higher then costs of technology used to support the content... -- _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk}  16:30, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Piotrus, personnel expenses are not "~3/2 of technical". Staff salaries might be more than the cost of bandwidth and hosting alone, but maintaining and replacing equipment (represented here by depreciation) relates entirely to the technical side.

Further regarding the staff costs, a good portion of them are developers whose work is entirely devoted to improving technical matters and keeping the site running. With all due respect to anyone who thinks that should all be handled without hiring staff, a) you are entirely welcome to step up, put your money time where your mouth is, and volunteer, and b) even with the use of paid staff, the available resources have so far been too limited to produce much-demanded features like stable versions or single login.

For public discussions of staffing issues, it's been primarily on foundation-l (a couple examples), but responses have tended more towards enthusiasm than debate about the expense. The remaining staff have largely been hired on a basis of organizational need to handle issues that urgently require attention but for which volunteers are inadequate. Some of this is a natural function of scaling up as an organization—when you're suddenly dealing with large amounts of money daily, you need somebody to handle that money. Otherwise bills don't get paid and all the servers in the world don't matter when the lights go dark. Similarly with a General Counsel and legal issues, it's to guard against threats to continued operation.

Relatively speaking, bandwidth and servers are inexpensive from a business perspective, and the strain they put on Wikimedia finances is a sign of the Foundation being run on the cheap. It actually holds the Foundation back from plans to hire more staff, especially developers. For most organizations with any kind of staff (including nonprofits and technology companies), salaries will be the single largest expense, usually by a hefty margin. --Michael Snow 18:03, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

That's a very good point. I completly agree hirining more pros and pay them well, and that the sign of salaries overtaking equipment costs is a positive sign of maturity - but I believe we should explain the reasons for it clearly when this comes up, otherwise we will have many people unfamiliar with the business running realities asking 'why'? -- _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk}  21:24, 13 February 2007 (UTC)